There are spells in my pockets as I leave my hovel out East and the seething summer of my Discontent. The humidity is like a sickness, an involuntary lethargy. I have bid my farewells. I dined with the Saturday Sangha. We ate crunchy salads and played the game of enlightenment, a board game where one makes points by climbing the chakra pole and wins by landing in the right space at the right time and making lucky guesses. I met one last time with my "coven" for white sangria and tasty gourmet snacks. All in attendance wished me well, a few of them had souls that wanted to go with me and minds that knew they had to stay, still others struggled with my decision, didn’t understand how a person could just go off, all willy-nilly to start over. But this is what I do, I crave it. They took up a collection for gas money to aid in my travels.

Some folks are secretly happy to see me go, others will miss me and the quirky brand of mysticism I bring to the group. I will miss all of them, most of whom I never would have guessed had I met them under different, more “normal” circumstances, that I would be grooving in the sacred grove with. Yet groove we did. To keep our secret we called ourselves an Herb Club, it made it easier for those who still had old dogma hanging like moth-eaten Sunday dresses in their spiritual closets. I head for the Midwest first, I have to make a stop to bid adieu to the place where I spent the winter of my discontent years before, there were no goodbyes then, just a quick escape from judgment and persecution, like a character from the bible.

So why is it so hard for folks to believe that a person can just move, start all over, give up their “security” and move off into the unknown? I don’t know the answer to that. To me the better question is how can a person not do that every once in a while? How can people just stay in one place, for years and years, working the same job, living in the same neighborhood and all the while collecting possessions, the more of which you have the harder it becomes to move around. Is it for a sense of security? Is security defined as having everything stay exactly and nauseatingly the same? Is everything staying the same what we actually crave or is it just the way we're trained to live? I suppose that like so many things it’s subjective, it depends upon variables, like personality, environment, how one was raised and so on. For my part I'm indifferent to the why or to what folks think about it. Some people run marathons, I move around.

Tom Robbins once suggested that people should spend six months of the year working hard, focusing on their jobs and then spend the other six months of the year migrating with herds of elk. I don’t know any elk, the chances of meeting them has increased dramatically now that I’m back out west though. A friend back east suggested that I move around a lot because I’m running away from something, but that isn’t it. She might have suggested it after considering her own stagnant existence, the rut she was in. We both knew it, we had been friends a long time. I know her well. It’s a nice rut, but it’s a rut, and she knows it as well as I do, it’s like a sweet stagnation.

There are perks, the main one being that nice sense of security that comes with things that never change. Sure there’s that vacation twice a year. They go to the same place every time for that as well. Wow. Still, there are worse ruts. I suppose there’s always a rut, I could think of my current situation as a rut if that were a choice I wanted to make, but I choose how I see things. I chose to start over yet again, it opens doors and opportunities I may not have otherwise had. People may not understand, even when I explain it to them and that’s a choice they make.

This brings me to the subject of choice. There is a book called Still Life with Woodpecker, again by Tom Robbins. In the book he points out the importance of choice, he calls it the word no mirror can distort…or something like that. The first time I read it I was in middle school and I had to check. I took the book and held it to a mirror. Sure enough, the entire paragraph was all upside down and backwards, all but one word, the word CHOICE. Of course, it has to be all in capitals but at the age of 13 I remember finding this discovery quite profound. Ever since then I think about choice a lot. When I have a big decision to make or when someone is questioning my choices, which is all too frequent.

I often ponder what the influences have been in my life that drive me to make the choices I make. I would like to believe that I am a free thinker, that I forge my own path and my choices are a result of what I choose to need or want, unaffected by society and uninfluenced by what others tell me to do. But let’s get real, there are always others to consider, one can spend a lifetime figuring out a balance between what they want to make themselves happy and what they are obligated to do to make others happy. Some spend a lot of time figuring out what the difference is between a need and a want and some look further to figure out why. These can end up being the long term lessons, the things we learn throughout life, sometimes having to make adjustments according to the variables.

I think about things that inspired me, for those who don’t understand the constant flux that is my life I offer these:

“I am free, no matter what rules surround me. If I find them tolerable, I tolerate them; if I find them too obnoxious, I break them. I am free because I know that I alone am morally responsible for everything I do.” -Robert A. Heinlein

“Some tourists think Amsterdam is a city of sin, but in truth it is a city of freedom. And in freedom, most people find sin.” ― John Green

“When the people fear the government there is tyranny, when the government fears the people there is liberty.” ― Thomas Jefferson

“Better to die on one's feet than to live on one's knees.” ― Jean-Paul Sartre

“The things you own end up owning you. It's only after you lose everything that you're free to do anything.” ― Chuck Palahniuk

“Disobedience is the true foundation of liberty. The obedient must be slaves.” ― Henry David Thoreau

“If other people do not understand our behavior—so what? Their request that we must only do what they understand is an attempt to dictate to us. If this is being "asocial" or "irrational" in their eyes, so be it. Mostly they resent our freedom and our courage to be ourselves. We owe nobody an explanation or an accounting, as long as our acts do not hurt or infringe on them. How many lives have been ruined by this need to "explain," which usually implies that the explanation be "understood," i.e. approved. Let your deeds be judged, and from your deeds, your real intentions, but know that a free person owes an explanation only to himself—to his reason and his conscience—and to the few who may have a justified claim for explanation.” ― Erich Fromm

"Free speech means the right to shout 'theatre' in a crowded fire.” ― Abbie Hoffman

There are so many I could go on and on! Leo Tolstoy, Jack London, Nicolai Gogol…there’s Thoreau, Stegner, Pasternak, Nietzsche, Kerouac, Ginsberg…These are some of my influences, how could I have turned out any differently?

Of course it wouldn’t feel right if I didn’t leave a final quote by Tom Robbins:

“If you lack the iron and the fizz to take control of your own life, if you insist on leaving your fate to the gods, then the gods will repay your weakness by having a grin or two at your expense. Should you fail to pilot your own ship, don’t be surprised at what inappropriate port you find yourself docked…The price of self-destiny is never cheap, and in certain situations it is unthinkable. But to achieve the marvelous, it is precisely the unthinkable that must be thought.”

So when people tell me I’m selfish for trotting around being nomadic, moving around from one place to the next like a bird that was so formerly caged but has found freedom agreeable, I take it with a grain of salt. When they tell me I make them worry or I make them feel abandoned all I can do is smile my bohemian smile and simply point out that I cannot make a person feel anything, they are free to feel however they choose.